Trauma and Recovery: New Challenges to Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Abstract

This chapter introduces the volume’s overarching arguments and contributions to the fields of trauma and motherhood studies in twenty-first-century literature and culture. Echoing Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992), this volume is situated in a psychoanalytical framework. While trauma studies have been booming for the past 25 years since the publication of Cathy Caruth’s ground-breaking study, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), surprisingly little critical attention has been given to the intersection of motherhood and trauma. The present volume aims at bridging this gap, as well as bringing to the forefront marginalized maternal experiences and voices, thus challenging stereotypical notions of motherhood as the ultimate fulfillment or as catharsis—especially in the wake of historical catastrophe. The contributions included here engage with a transnational corpus drawn from the five continents and span topics as under-studied as pregnancy denial, surrogacy, voluntary or involuntary childlessness, racism and motherhood, carceral mothering practices, surrogacy, IVF, artificial wombs, and mothering through war, genocide, and migration. Accompanied by an online creative supplement, this volume enhances a better understanding of the cathartic effects of storytelling.